LoopMe Unveils

October 29th, 2012 by Russell Buckley

Another of the companies in my loose affiliation of a portfolio is LoopMe, which has just emerged from stealth mode to take on some of the challenges we face in mobile advertising. My role is currently a Board Advisor along with the excellent Kate Burns – the first employee of Google outside the US back in the day and more latterly CEO of AOL Europe.

The management team we’re advising is a couple of mobile advertising veterans with excellent pedigrees, Stephen Upstone and Marco Van de Bergh, who worked together at Ad Infuse and Velti. They’ve been beavering away for months and have a working product in the wild and in use – we’re not talking vapourware here.

The idea behind LoopMe starts with the in-App user experience of mobile advertising. Currently, the user is presented with advertising that works on the old, intrusive model of trying to compete to get attention with the content of the app itself. Often this means more garish or interruptive formats, that can actually degrade the user experience.

LoopMe starts from the opposite point of view. A pretty small percentage of users ever engage with advertising in the first place – certainly less than 20%. So, let’s not bother trying to get the attention of the 80% who aren’t interested and focus on the few who actually want to interact.

They do this by providing an In-Box for app publishers to install (about a 10 minute integration process) and then fill that with ads that the LoopMe algorithm predicts that the specific user might like to engage with. This means that anyone who sees the ads will have made an active decision to see them and will clearly be more predisposed to engage with them too.

From an app developer/publisher point of view, it’s also a compelling proposition. More “free money” from advertising, without needing to change other ad partners – the inventory is incremental, as well as revenues – and a better, cleaner user experience. Moreover, clicking on an ad keeps the user within the app, not off into the browser, which is the case with many other ad formats. Why wouldn’t they try it?

The final part of the trinity is advertisers themselves. Again, the proposition is powerful, as they’re being offered a conversation with users that actually want to talk in the first place.